On the one hand, cool, on the other, the abstract is deceptive because it tries to claim that the AI trained is “harmless but nonevasive AI assistant” but what the paper in fact claims is that Anthropic trained an AI that has a higher harmlessness and helpfulness score and thus offers a Pareato improvement over previous models but is not definitely across some bar we could say is harmless vs. not-harmless or helpful vs. not-helpful. As much is also stated in the included figure.
The work is cool, don’t get me wrong. We should celebrate it. But also I want abstracts that aren’t deceptive and add the necessary words to precisely explain what is being claimed in the paper. I’d be much happier if the abstract read something like “to train a more harmless and less evasive AI assistant than previous attempts that engages with harmful queries by more often explaining its objections to them than avoiding answering” or something similar.
I really do empathize with the authors, since writing an abstract fundamentally requires trading off faithfulness to the paper content and the length and readability of the abstract. But I do agree that they could’ve been more precise without a significant increase in length.
Nitpick: I think instead of expanding on the sentence
As a result we are able to train a more harmless and less evasive AI assistant than previous attempts that engages with harmful queries by more often explaining its objections to them than avoiding answering
My proposed rewrite is to replace that sentence with something like:
As a result, we were able to train an AI assistant is simultaneously less harmful and evasive. Even on adversarial queries, our model generally provides nuanced explanations instead of evading the question.
I think this is ~ the same length and same level of detail but a lot easier to parse.
On the one hand, cool, on the other, the abstract is deceptive because it tries to claim that the AI trained is “harmless but nonevasive AI assistant” but what the paper in fact claims is that Anthropic trained an AI that has a higher harmlessness and helpfulness score and thus offers a Pareato improvement over previous models but is not definitely across some bar we could say is harmless vs. not-harmless or helpful vs. not-helpful. As much is also stated in the included figure.
The work is cool, don’t get me wrong. We should celebrate it. But also I want abstracts that aren’t deceptive and add the necessary words to precisely explain what is being claimed in the paper. I’d be much happier if the abstract read something like “to train a more harmless and less evasive AI assistant than previous attempts that engages with harmful queries by more often explaining its objections to them than avoiding answering” or something similar.
I really do empathize with the authors, since writing an abstract fundamentally requires trading off faithfulness to the paper content and the length and readability of the abstract. But I do agree that they could’ve been more precise without a significant increase in length.
Nitpick: I think instead of expanding on the sentence
My proposed rewrite is to replace that sentence with something like:
I think this is ~ the same length and same level of detail but a lot easier to parse.